Enchantments as part of the everyday. 

Supernatural visitations while doing the dishes.  

Spells cast and cures given through an old grandmother’s mutterings.

Magical feminism is a sub-genre of magical realism, first used by the literary critic Patricia Hart to describe the work of celebrated Chilean author, Isabel Allende. It makes use of the surreal or supernatural, interweaving it with the ordinary realities of women’s lives to bring into focus the strangeness of ‘living as female’. 

In stories of magical feminism, the extraordinary becomes ordinary as women shamans and shapeshifters, witches and seers all express specific female experiences and identities. The female body is the central location of magic – But its generative power is not just about what it can bring to the future but also how we can readdress and reinterpret our past through an ancestry of daughters.

Women writers of this genre alongside Allende include Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel, Chicana author Ana Castillo, American short story writer, Carmen Maria Machado, African-American Pulitzer Prize winner, Toni Morrison, British writer Jeanette Winterson, and Indian best-seller Arundhati Roy. 

Pick up one of their books today from our online bookshop and sink deep into a world where the female spirit is fierce and free.